{"title":"Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana","authors":"J. Beek","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2019.1697315","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned the wait to get their money back. Instead of exploring economic questions, this paper will explore practices of waiting in the context of the scheme to understand the connection between social relationships and imagined futures. In DKM, actors engaged in deeply social forms of waiting, and these were part of late-modern financial schemes, leading to various forms of synchronization. When the tension between the social and instrumental aspects of this waiting emerged after the scheme’s collapse, actors – in Northern Ghana at least – ultimately decided to preserve their relationships. Looking back, actors speak about this period as a time of hope, a time in which waiting seemed to be over in a more existential sense.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"153 1","pages":"107 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical African Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2019.1697315","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned the wait to get their money back. Instead of exploring economic questions, this paper will explore practices of waiting in the context of the scheme to understand the connection between social relationships and imagined futures. In DKM, actors engaged in deeply social forms of waiting, and these were part of late-modern financial schemes, leading to various forms of synchronization. When the tension between the social and instrumental aspects of this waiting emerged after the scheme’s collapse, actors – in Northern Ghana at least – ultimately decided to preserve their relationships. Looking back, actors speak about this period as a time of hope, a time in which waiting seemed to be over in a more existential sense.
期刊介绍:
Critical African Studies seeks to return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation within each of its constituent disciplines, including Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law and Economics. We offer authors a more flexible publishing platform than other journals, allowing them greater space to develop empirical discussions alongside theoretical and conceptual engagements. We aim to publish scholarly articles that offer both innovative empirical contributions, grounded in original fieldwork, and also innovative theoretical engagements. This speaks to our broader intention to promote the deployment of thorough empirical work for the purposes of sophisticated theoretical innovation. We invite contributions that meet the aims of the journal, including special issue proposals that offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into African Studies debates.